IE8 beta1 introduced Loosely Coupled IE (LCIE) which gives tab a level of process isolation from the frame: http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2008/03/11/ie8-and-loosely-coupled-ie-lcie.aspx. For the most part this works pretty well. But certain binary extensions (activeX objecst, BHOs, etc) that are already deployed have assumptions about window hierarchy and process model. To get this to work the IE team…

I was looking at some code the other day that does string concatenation with StringCchPrintf(“%s%s”). I can imagine how this would have near optimal performance, and a hopeful developer could easily assume that in fact it has been tuned for this kind of concatenation. But measuring tells all. Three trivial implementations of concat using strsafe.h:void…

… like a water snake. Which is why we measure, measure and measure again. Even the most obvious rule of thumb can be wrong. I was optimizing some string parsing code (which is almost always ripe for optimization), and trying to reduce the cost of traversing a string. When iterating over the elements of an…

Windows Explorer has a default implementation for IContextMenu commonly called DefCM that has been used since Win95. It has many clients and has evolved over time, of course, but its primary focus has always been to support the most important of shell folders: File System Folder. A big part of this support revolves around extensibility….

For my first blog entry, I will start with something I wrote for my team back in 1997 (reedited for this blog) that has been helpful to generations of subsequently bewildered developers: Go back to 1995 and a small team dreaming an impossible dream of the Internet on Windows! URLs were young, so young they still hadn’t…